National Australia Bank's venture arm has acquired a stake in Zodia Custody, joining Standard Chartered, Northern Trust and Japan's SBI Holdings as investors in the digital asset safekeeping platform.
News of the investment comes just days after it emerged that the Australian bank has abandoned plans to mint its own stablecoin, AUDN, and marks a pivotal shift for the bank's crypto strategy into the institutional safekeeping arena.
Last year Zodia Custody announced it had set up shop in Australia, planning to serve local institutional clients. The Australian platform, dubbed SAF3, signed asset manager DigitalX as its first Australian client. As part of the pilot run, NAB teamed up with Zodia to test the capabilities of the SAF3 platform.
Speaking at the time, Howard Silby, NAB’s chief innovation officer, said: “Over a nine-week period, we tested Zodia’s integration and compliance capabilities, technology, and governance processes. The results were overwhelmingly positive.”
With the change in strategy, the developers working on the inital stablecoin project have since broken away from the bank to build their own version of the digital dollar, branded Ubiquity.